Monster
by Catty Vancouver
Summary: Years after the war, Marco is visited by a man with questions about the fate of his son.


_Monster_

The thing about saving the world is that you can never save everyone.

Jake felt it more than I did. Jake felt the burden of every dead Yeerk, every Hork-Bajir, every Auxiliary Animorph, and every innocent bystander. They weighed him down, made him older than he really was. And those were nothing compared to Rachel and Tom—Jake walked around every day with his brother and cousin hanging from his shoulders. It had a physical manifestation—at the ripe old age of 18, my best friend had already begun to stoop.

Me….I didn't feel it as much. Rachel died, but then, none of us were ever supposed to make it out of the war alive. People die in wars. Once in a while Rachel's face, or James', or the face of some random Hork-Bajir whose skull I had bashed in would appear in the mirror instead of my own, but it was nothing I couldn't get rid of with a few swigs of tequila or whichever supermodel was answering my calls.

Back before the war ended, I had fantasized about what it would be like to win: the fame, the fortune, the freedom from responsibility. My parents, together and happy again. My friends, alive.

But I had also pictured what it would be like if things went the other way. I spent long dark hours imagining how each of us would die. Rachel, of course, would go down first in a blaze of glory, probably involving fire or explosives, and taking out more Yeerks than the rest of us combined. Jake would sacrifice himself for the team and the rest of us would be forced to watch Visser Three murder him. Tobias and Ax would die together after they had killed Visser Three and finally avenged Elfangor. Cassie would turn to the Yeerk Peace Movement for help, trust the wrong person, and be killed when they betrayed her. And I, the last one standing, would lose it all in my final attempt to save my mother.

In the end, those things didn't happen. We won, and I had the fame, the riches, and most of my friends still alive.

And unlike Jake, I was able to live with it. Because I'm not the guy that needed to save everyone. I only needed to save the world.

"Sir, your visitor is waiting in your office," my butler, Weatherbee, reminded me.

I didn't need reminding. I knew who was in my office and why he was there.

My lawyer had been the one to call me. I had told her, right after everything ended, that one day this man would be trying to contact the Animorphs and that he was to be connected to me, and me alone. Rachel was dead, and Tobias was gone. Jake couldn't handle it. Cassie…she was too soft for this. It wouldn't destroy her, but she wouldn't be able to look this man in the eyes and tell him the truth the way that I could.

Over two years had gone by since the world had first heard the word "Animorph". It had taken him longer than I had expected.

I finally stood up from the edge of my bed and adjusted my tie in the full length mirror. I was wearing a nice suit—Brooks Brothers. It made me look dignified and older than I was. "You look very nice, sir," Weatherbee assured me. I eyed the fancy crystal brandy set that was just an excuse to keep liquor in my bedroom. Weatherbee followed my gaze. "Sir?"

I shook my head. Not a good idea.

The man waiting in my office was around my father's age. It had been four or five years since I had last seen him—he hadn't aged well. His hair was gray, his face sagged, and the hand he reached out to shake mine with was badly deformed.

"Thank you for agreeing to meet with me," he said, sitting back down as I took the seat behind my desk.

I nodded. "What is it that I can do for you?"

"I wondered…I wondered if you could tell me what happened to my son, David."

I set my hands down on the dark wood of the desk, lacing my fingers together to keep them from shaking.

"He disappeared when he was thirteen years old," David's father continued, staring down at his own hands, folded on his lap. "This was before the public knew about the invasion, of course. David somehow came into possession of an Escafil Device. They were never sure how that happened. He put it for sale on the internet and it was seen by the Yeerk who was at that time known as Visser Three. He came to our home. My wife and I were infested. But David and the Escafil Device were taken by the Andalite Bandits." He paused and looked up at my face for the first time.

"But you know all of this. Because there were no Andalite Bandits. He was taken by you."

His words hung in the air, not quite an accusation, but close. "Yes," I said, but nothing else.

"My wife died in the war. She was killed in the explosion at the pool. I survived and was eventually released."

"I'm sorry to hear about your wife." I recognized the look on his face. It mirrored what I had seen on my own father every day for three years.

His face crumpled. "Thank you. You probably wonder why it's taken me so long to come see you," his voice shook as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief.

"Yes. I did wonder that," I admitted.

David's father didn't wipe at his eyes with the handkerchief, just folded it over and over in his lap. "I know that you took him and made him into one of you. He fought alongside of you for a short time, and then he disappeared. There was never a verified report of one of you dying in battle, and I would have known if he had been captured and infested as I was. I knew that either he died accidentally, or you had killed him."

The way out was right there. It would have made sense to tell him that David died on some minor mission, due to his inexperience. A quiet death that the Yeerks had been unaware of. Or I could have said he was too much of a liability, a risk, and we had killed him out of mercy to keep him from being infested. People die in wars. Cassie, and maybe even Jake, would have lied to him. It was the kinder thing to do for a man that had already lost so much. Make David a hero, a casualty of the war.

But, see, I'm not Cassie. Or Jake.

And David was no hero.

"No," I said, my voice colder than I meant it to be. "We didn't kill your son."

I regretted it for only an instant when I saw a flash of hope in the man's eyes before reality hit him. "Then…where is he?"

I should have drank the brandy—just a quick gulp, just enough to get me through the confused look on David's father's face.

"He was trapped in a morph."

The desperate hopefulness returned as he grasped at the possibility of his son being alive, in any form. "Where is he? What was he trapped as?"

"David was trapped as a rat. We left him on a small island off the coast. Rats in the wild have a very short life span. I doubt that he is still alive today."

I saw every bit of the horror of David's fate cross over his father's face. "A rat," he said. "My son died as a rat."

I could have left it at that. Maybe I should have—just given him the location of the island, a place to leave some flowers and have a good cry for everything the war had taken from him.

But.

"Your son died a monster," I corrected him. "Your son was a murderer and a traitor, and if we hadn't done what we did, the entire planet would have been enslaved."

David's father recoiled. "You trapped him as a rat intentionally?"

"I'm telling you this because you have a right to know the truth." But I was lying. As far as I knew, David's father was, and always had been, a good man. He didn't deserve the information I was giving him and the pain that would come with it—a pretty lie would have been better than the truth.

But I didn't care about any of that. I was going to destroy him.

"What….how…?"

"He tried to kill us. Tobias, Jake, Rachel—all of us. He planned to turn us in to the Yeerks. Every single person on this planet would be dead or enslaved, because of your son."

There was a grown man sitting across from me, the age of my own father, struggling to breathe because of me—I was, word-by-word, shattering everything that was left of this man's life.

And I couldn't stop.

"He—he was a child!" David's father gasped, gripping at the handkerchief, twisting it as though he meant to tear it apart. "Just a child…my boy."

"We were all children," I reminded him, aware that, despite my desk and fancy suit, I was still only 18 years old myself. "Children can save the world. Or destroy it."

My office was silent except for the harsh, ragged breathing that hadn't quite turned into sobs.

"Tell me again," I said finally, when I couldn't take the sound any longer. "Why did you wait two years to come to me?"

David's father only shook his head, but I knew. He had suspected all along what had happened to his son—probably not the specifics, I doubt he could have imagined that we had ever been cruel enough to do what we did, but he knew the real reason why his son had never been heard from again. I remembered suddenly what David's father had done before the war—he had been a CIA agent, a job that, from my understanding, makes a person good at reading people. It confirmed something I had assumed all along, long before I ever thought about this man paying me a visit:

David had always been a monster.

And some people were never meant to be saved.

"You knew?" I asked.

"I thought I could make him better. We moved, had him change schools, but I could still see it. My wife thought I was crazy, we never caught him doing anything exactly _wrong_, but…"

I slammed my hand down onto my desk and the bang made David's father jump. "You knew." I said slowly, rising to my feet. "You knew what he was and you sent him to school with other kids-"

"I didn't-I never thought that-"

"He was a MURDERER!" I shouted, unable to stop myself. David's father collapsed into himself, his sobs shaking the entire room. The world had never learned about the true fate of Saddler, Rachel and Jake's cousin. But I remembered how David had disconnected him from his breathing machines and left him in an elevator shaft to suffocate. I remembered how David had torn apart a red-tailed hawk he thought was Tobias, and left Jake, as a tiger, to bleed to death.

I remembered how he had swung a baseball bat into my own head and left me tied up in my closet. I couldn't sleep for days, convinced that he would come back for me and finish the job, or worse, use the morph of me that he took to murder my friends.

"Cassie didn't want to kill him," I whispered, not even sure if David's father could hear me over his own sobs. "She thought it would be kinder to keep him alive. But I knew that David would suffer more and suffer longer as the rat. And I _wanted_ him to suffer."

I could have lied to him, or let someone else do it. I didn't know why I needed to do this. My life was good. David had been gone for years. He had paid for his sins, but I hadn't been able to pass up this one last chance to punish him even further.

Weatherbee escorted David's father out. Three days later, my lawyer contacted me again to inform me that he had been found dead. Suicide.

Like I said, you can never save everyone.

Mostly I felt relieved. I would never have to look at him again, never have to think about David.

Never have to wonder if maybe David hadn't been the only monster.


End file.
